Leadership Austin Blog: May 2011 Engage

Leadership Austin’s alumni take up their roles of service in a wide variety of contexts and issues, working to solve difficult community problems and create positive change. Two such alumni - Mark Williams (Essential 2004), AISD Board President, and Janet Mitchell (Essential 2006), AISD Task Force Co-Chair - have recently played (and in the case of Mark are still playing) key roles in one of Austin’s most contentious ongoing issues. That issue is the difficult possibility of school closures due to a variety of factors - including reductions in state funding and changing demographic and geographic growth patterns - which, combined with a relatively open transfer policy, have led to imbalance in utilization across AISD campuses.

Janet Mitchell, Mark Williams, and Jim Walker

Our last Engage breakfast of the 2010-11 season was a special, candid dialogue about the challenges a high-profile community volunteer faces when tackling difficult issues over the long term. This was not a public hearing on the AISD Facility Master Plan or the current AISD budget, but a discussion about the individual leadership lessons drawn from the ongoing AISD facility master planning and budget processes.

Speakers:

Janet Mitchell – Co-Chair, AISD Facilities Master Planning Task Force
Mark Williams – President, AISD Board of Trustees
Moderated by Jim Walker – Director of Sustainability, The University of Texas at Austin

References from the discussion: